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Breaking Away

By Joseph C. Panettieri

04/01/07

Open source projects may free universities from expensive, rigid commercial software. But will the rewards outweigh the potential risks?

Brad Wheeler is breaking with tradition. As CIO of
Indiana University, Wheeler is leading an ambitious
move to open source-based applications that will manage
the bulk of the university’s business and academic
systems. One of the initiatives, known as the Kuali Project, involves multiple universities
writing and sharing code for their financial and operational
systems. Another, the Sakai Project, is a community
source platform for academic teaching and course management
(see “How Much Do You Know About…”).

If they succeed, Kuali and Sakai are bold initiatives that could free
universities from rigid commercial software that’s often expensive to
acquire and maintain. But the journey to open source freedom also
includes numerous risks. While commercial software has a support
network including thousands of hardware, software, and integration
partners, niche open source projects may involve only a few hundred—
or even a few dozen—software developers worldwide.

Still, more and more universities are seeing the upside of open
source. In fact, right now, many universities are deploying or evaluating
open source databases, e-mail systems, and business applications.
Even voice over IP (VoIP) hardware and call management
systems increasingly leverage open source software known as Asterisk (see “Know Your Options”).

Kuali and Sakai are unique, however,
in that they are designed for universities,
by universities. Unlike traditional, loosely
organized open source projects which
can involve the random contributions of
programmers from across the world
(some of whom are well-known, some
lesser-known) and which can cause problems
related to communications, project
priorities, cultural issues, etc., the Kuali
and Sakai projects have formal, organized
teams stretched across multiple
universities, with clearly defined responsibilities
and goals. Active participants
in the initiatives include Cornell University
(NY), Michigan State University,
San Joaquin Delta College (CA),
and The University of Arizona, just to
name a few.

“In essence, we’re pooling our monies
to run a disciplined project,” says Wheeler,
who also serves as chairman of the
Kuali Project Board. “These aren’t tight
consortiums where you’re locked in for
five years: Everyone has walk-away
rights, but we’re held together by enlightened
self-interest. Each university can
write incremental improvements and take
advantage of other peoples’ research.”

Cornell, for instance, is writing a Kuali
reporting module that IU plans to deploy.
Contrast that with the commercial software
market, where license agreements
frequently bar universities and businesses
from sharing homegrown software
enhancements with one another.

Another key benefit of the open source
movement: Universities frequently can
make module enhancements without taking
any systems offline. Notes Wheeler:
“It’s the opposite of commercial ERP
upgrades, where you often have to deal
with numerous interruptions as you pay
seven figures for an upgrade.”

Taking Control

After several years of development,
many of the open source components are
ready for prime time. Kuali Financial
System 1.0 is out the door and drawing
attention from smaller colleges. A nextgeneration
release, to be dubbed 1.1 or
2.0, will debut this December. Assuming
the upgrade meets Indiana’s scalability
needs, the university will begin deploying
it as soon as it becomes available.

SOFTWARE PROS & CONS

Commercial Software

PROS :: Strong support network of
independent software vendors,
resellers, and integrators,
Established track record in
production environments,
Generally scalable
and reliable

CONS :: No access to source code, No rights to share self-developed
enhancements, High acquisition fees and
maintenance fees.

CONS :: Limited network of resellers
and integrators, Limited track record in
production environments, Potential hidden support costs,
from vendor or from need to hire
full-time open source experts

By 2009, many larger universities will
likely deploy Kuali, according to former
university financial officer David Lyons,
now senior fellow of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. He notes:
“We have to execute well on the remaining
module developments, and we need
some successful deployments to point to”
(that is, in order for Kuali to reach a tipping
point and gain widespread acceptance
throughout higher education). That’s already happening with Sakai,
which is a bit more mature than Kuali.
“Right now at IU, we’ve reached a critical
mass of users with Sakai,” says Wheeler.
“We’re looking to retire our old system at
the end of this summer.”

Indeed, the university has 90,000
users on Sakai, and 74 percent of all
course materials have moved over to the
new system. “We now have absolute
control of our destiny,” says the CIO.
“Under the old system, we could only
innovate as fast as we could afford to.”

Indiana University’s open source environment
continues to borrow heavily
from peer universities. For instance, IU
has deployed a wiki component from the
University of Cambridge (UK) and podcasting
code co-developed with the University
of Michigan.

How Much Do You Know About...

Sakai Project :: Sakai is an online collaboration and learning
environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to
support teaching and learning, ad hoc group
collaboration, portfolios, and research collaboration.
Sakai is a free-to-acquire open source
product that is built and maintained by the Sakai
community (although there are in-house support
costs involved). Sakai’s development model is
called “community source” because many of the
developers creating Sakai are drawn from the
“community” of organizations that have adopted
and are using Sakai.

Kuali Project :: The Kuali Financial System is based on the
proven financial system design that has been
used at Indiana University for over 10 years. Its
modular format includes a base system of chart
of accounts, general ledger, transactions, reporting,
and workflow. Additional modules will include:

Accounts receivable

Budgeting

Capital assets management

Endowment

Enhanced decision support/reporting

Labor distribution

Purchasing/accounts payable

Pre- and post-award research administration

Whitman College (WA) has also
hopped aboard the Sakai bandwagon,
according to Mike Osterman, a middleware
analyst at the college. Whitman’s
Sakai deployment, known as CLEo (Collaboration
and Learning Environment
online), has been a steppingstone to gradually
migrating away from a Blackboard implementation,
according to Osterman. “We started looking
at alternatives in 2004, and Sakai was
pretty raw at the time,” he says. “But we
knew it would give us the flexibility to
develop our own enhancements without
spending a chunk of change to license
more software.”

Risk vs. Cost

Many advocates believe open source projects
can save universities money that’s
typically allocated for ERP licenses and
deployments. But universities have to
look beyond the dollars and cents for
even more benefits, say the pundits.

“Open source should not be about
bashing the commercial software vendors,”
says Lyons; “there’s an ongoing
place in the market for them. The open
source movement is more about design:
Not only are these new applications
designed for and by people in higher
education; there will be hundreds and
hundreds of new eyes looking at the
code and the capabilities to ensure we’re
meeting users’ needs.”

Still, moving to open source has its
risks. When commercial software hits a
bump, universities can turn to software
suppliers for emergency service and support.
If an open source code base fails, it
can be difficult to track down the specific
developer who can find and fix software
bugs. In truth, moving to Sakai was
“definitely a bit of a leap of faith,” Osterman
concedes. “We decided to do a oneyear
pilot. If it didn’t work out, we
agreed we’d go back to the drawing
board and start over.”

Whitman College launched its pilot in
the fall of 2005. The effort included a gap
analysis project that identified core
Blackboard-type capabilities that the
open source system would need to support.
The university included 10 faculty
members in the pilot’s first semester,
then expanded it to 16 faculty members
in the second semester. “We wanted to
keep it fairly low-profile and make sure
each of the individual testers bought into
the project,” says Osterman.

Smart move: Thanks to faculty testing
and feedback, Whitman College was able
to move CLEo into a production environment
in the fall of 2006. Osterman says the
system offers three clear benefits:

Code transparency—an IT environment
that’s truly open for enhancement
without any need to negotiate with vendors.

International reach. The CLEo project
helped Whitman College to work
more closely with leading institutions
worldwide.

History Lesson

This journey to open source would have
been unimaginable even a few years ago.
For decades, universities have relied on
completely homegrown information systems
or complex commercial software to
run their financial, academic, and development
operations. But ERP and other commercial
applications were frequently horizontal
by design, and lacked deep vertical
features written specifically for higher ed.
Often, universities had to pay vendors extra
fees for custom modules that assisted student recruitment, enrollment, and campus
services. Even at a small college with fewer
than 10,000 students, annual license and
maintenance fees can cost $100,000 or
more. “That’s a lot of money for bug fixes
that should have been corrected before the
products even shipped,” quips Ed Golod,
president of Revenue Accelerators, New York-based
technology consultants.

Indiana University balked at that
approach in the 1990s and instead worked
with American Management Systems
(acquired by CGI Group in 2004), a major IT consulting system,
to design and deploy a client-server system.
The system proved reliable and scalable,
but like many client-server systems
that were written for specific operating
systems and application programming
interfaces (APIs), the software lacked
modern features for the internet age.

Moving to Sakai was a leap of faith. If it didn't work out, we agreed we'd go back to the drawing board.— Mike Osterman, Whitman College

While universities were wrestling with
internal development efforts or commercial
ERP deployments, the open source
movement quietly began in the early
1990s. From the Linux operating system to the Apache web server, developers worldwide
agreed to write and share code
enhancements for the greater common
good. Still, open source wasn’t an
overnight sensation. Even the most
promising projects required many years
to fully shine. It took nearly a decade for
Linux and Apache to gain critical mass
on corporate servers. Apache is now the
internet’s dominant web server and Linux
commands more than 30 percent of the
server operating system market, according
to market research firm International Data Corp.

More recently, open source applications
have gained traction in businesses
and on university campuses. Zimbra, an open source
e-mail provider, says its e-mail inbox
software has been downloaded from the
web more than 6 million times. Many of
those downloads landed within university
settings, according to a spokesperson
for the company. Other increasingly popular
open source applications include
Centric CRM,
MySQL, JasperSoft
(for business intelligence),
and SugarCRM.

Even Apple is benefiting
from the open source movement.
Apple’s Mac OS X code is based on
Unix, a close relative of
Linux. That makes it easy for programmers
to write Linux applications that
they can test and deploy on Mac OS X. In
fact, in February, IBM unveiled an open source desktop initiative
that will provide tools for writing
applications that run across Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

If you hitch your wagon to the wrong open source project and it loses steam, you could wind up with a dead-end technology.— Ed Golod, Revenue Accelerators

Smaller vendors are also working to
fan the open source flames. In February,
Centric CRM and a dozen other open
source companies formed the Open Solutions Alliance. The group aims to promote
interoperability and enhanced support for
open source applications. Major integrators
including Unisys have lined up to support the alliance,
though it’s unclear how soon their work
will result in new integration hooks that
universities can leverage.

Look Before Leaping

As the open source sector continues to
grow, the ERP market continues to consolidate
through numerous mergers and
acquisitions, leaving Oracle, SAP AG,
and other companies such as SunGard as the
primary choices for such commercial
ERP systems. To be sure, the remaining
commercial options continue to offer
clear benefits. Generally speaking, they
are highly scalable, incredibly reliable,
and secure. Plus, they are backed by
thousands of integrators and valueadded
resellers (VARs) that can service
and support the deployments.

By contrast, open source solutions
typically have only scattered support in
the VAR and integrator community. Even
market leaders such as Red Hat have only a few hundred
Linux VARs across the globe—compared
to tens of thousands of partners
supporting Microsoft’s Windows Server, SQL Server, and
related applications. And while server
hardware suppliers such as IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems support Linux, that doesn’t
mean they’ll be familiar with niche open
source projects and modules that pop up
across the globe.

“Just about any database or CRM
integrator worth his salt will be familiar
with Oracle and Siebel solutions,” notes Golod. “But the
open source sector is hit-and-miss when
it comes to finding partners that can
help you.” (In the higher ed space,
rSmart is the leading
vendor stepping forward to provide
services to colleges and universities that
want the assistance of a commercial
vendor for community source implementations;
for example, the company
offers boxed versions of Sakai and Kuali
as well as consulting help.)

What’s more, many open source systems
don’t have all the features and
functions that universities take for
granted in their current commercial systems.
And it can take many years to fill
in those holes. Even the most vocal open
source proponents sometimes struggle
to get code upgrades out the door. Novell, provider of SUSE
Linux, is still striving to enhance the
operating system with high-end clustering
functions that many Unix providers
have offered for more than a decade.

Universities also can suffer if an open
source project stalls or is aborted. “If you
hitch your wagon to the wrong open
source project and it loses steam, you
could wind up with a dead-end technology,”
says Golod. “At least in the commercial
software market, you can watch a
publicly held software company’s financial
performance, in order to to estimate
a product’s long-term viability.”

Still, commercial ERP and academic
systems also have their downsides.
Deployments can cost millions of dollars
and frequently require years to complete.
Universities that write homegrown
systems face their own challenges,
including the need to employ and train
teams of programmers to perpetually
maintain and enhance the code.

For the most part, universities will continue
to rely on a mix of commercial and
open source solutions. Kuali and Sakai,
in particular, prove that there’s plenty of
room on campus for open source.